Alexander Parsons

Associate Professor

Alexander Parsons is a novelist and associate professor of creative writing. He is the author of the novel Leaving Disneyland, which won the Associated Writing Program’s Award for the Novel, the Writer’s League of Texas Violet Crown Award, and was a finalist for the PEN West Award. His second novel, In the Shadows of the Sun, was a Barnes & Discover Great New Writers selection. He has worked with Paramount Pictures as a Chesterfield Writing Fellow, where he wrote several screenplays, and has also taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as the John Gardner Fellow. He has received various recognitions for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, and a Texas Fellowship in Literature. At the University of New Hampshire he was awarded the Roland H. O’Neal Professorship for Excellence in Teaching; since joining the faculty at UH he’s been awarded the 2010 Teaching Excellence Award and the 2014 Ross M. Lence Award in the Humanities.

Parsons worked as an editor prior to graduate school. He emphasizes craft and technique in his workshops and especially enjoys the Advanced and Master workshops on long-form fiction (novellas, novels). Authors of particular interest include Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, and James Salter, though he’s interested in most contemporary fiction. Of late he’s enjoyed teaching dystopian literature and the work of sometimes novella-ists, such as César Aira, Alessandro Baricco, George Saunders, and Stephen Millhauser.